The problem in this situation is that you have a smart technical person arguing for technical purity, while at the same time (seemingly) ignoring the mostly non-technical considerations of user-experience and economics.
Yes, the old, conservative model of HTML is very simple, but when people use AJAX well, the user experience is enormously and materially improved. We're still early in the development of this medium, and many people will do it wrong. But even the people who do it right will probably seem inelegant and kludgey by the standards of the old model.
And yes, you can get both AJAX and clean URLs via (still poorly-supported) HTML5 History API and/or other progressive enhancement methods, but these may require a significant amount of additional effort. Maybe worth it, maybe not.
This topic reminds me of when sound was added to movies. "Tight coupling" and "hideous kludge" sound a lot like the arguments that were made against that too. The conventional wisdom was to make your talkie such that the story worked even without sound; one can still sometimes hear that, but it isn't, I think, a standard that we associate with the best movies being made today.
Yes, the old, conservative model of HTML is very simple, but when people use AJAX well, the user experience is enormously and materially improved. We're still early in the development of this medium, and many people will do it wrong. But even the people who do it right will probably seem inelegant and kludgey by the standards of the old model.
And yes, you can get both AJAX and clean URLs via (still poorly-supported) HTML5 History API and/or other progressive enhancement methods, but these may require a significant amount of additional effort. Maybe worth it, maybe not.
This topic reminds me of when sound was added to movies. "Tight coupling" and "hideous kludge" sound a lot like the arguments that were made against that too. The conventional wisdom was to make your talkie such that the story worked even without sound; one can still sometimes hear that, but it isn't, I think, a standard that we associate with the best movies being made today.